Subscriptions

Why subscribe to Slashdot? Can't I read for free?

You can absolutely read for free. Subscribing is
strictly optional. Right now, subscriptions serve one
major purpose: getting rid of ads on the page. (There
are a few other plums, too, see
"Are there other advantages to being a subscriber?"
below.)

Where / How can I purchase a subscription to slashdot?

Can I purchase a subscription for someone else? Can I do so anonymously?

Yes, Slashdot has added a gift subscription option to
allow you to do just that. When you go to purchase a
subscription choose the "Buy Gift Subscription for UID"
option and then enter the appropriate UID (username)
for the reader you'd like to bless. A textfield will
pop up, letting you say who the gift is from, or a
short message. The message will default to containing
your Slashdot username, but you can give anonymously,
too; just enter "Your Secret Friend" or something
similar there.

How much does a subscription cost?

Slashdot offers 1000 ad free pages for $5. You have
some flexibility as to where you want to spend your ad
free pages. You can decide to use them on
comments, articles,
or the homepage.

Paypal? Why Paypal?

It's a simple solution, and a lot of Slashdot users
already have Paypal accounts. If you prefer to use a
credit card, go right ahead.

I have an idea for a feature for subscription users.

Great! Please send it to us at
feedback@slashdot.org;
engineering time is limited, and there are always more
features that might be nice than we'll ever be able to
implement, but we greatly appreciate suggestions.

How do I see how many pages I've used up on my subscription?

While logged in, visit the
subscription page.
You'll be able to see your own subscription stats there
(how many ad-free pages purchased, and how many used).

I'm helping Slashdot by posting comments. Why are you charging people who help you?

When you subscribe, the default setting is for posting
comments (as well as reading just comments) to not
count as part of your subscription. You can change this
if you want, but we recognize that most frequent
readers, including our prolific comment posters, will
prefer to see ads on those pages and keep them
cost-free.

It looks like my payment didn't go through—Why?

In rare cases, a server glitch may prevent Slashdot
from knowing about your payment for a little while. If
your subscription page doesn't seem to know that you're
a subscriber yet, please allow at least twenty minutes
for our servers to retry their connections. If there's
still a problem, please email
subscriptions@slashdot.org.

I paid for a subscription and ads are still popping up!

Check the
subscriptions
page and make sure that you have "No Ads"
turned on where you don't want ads to show up.

Slashdot pages that are static, like this FAQ,
always serve ads.

We could be experiencing technical difficulties
and we've turned on a static front page.

If you are a subscriber and saw an ad, it will
not count against your subscription. If you
are sure that pages on which you are seeing ads are
incrementing your "used up" count on
subscribe.pl,
that's a serious bug—please let us know, by
emailing
feedback@slashdot.org,
with as much pertinent information as possible (such as
your user name, and details of what you've observed).

In general, what pages count towards my subscription base?

There are currently three types of pages that Slashdot
generates for subscribers.

Static

The FAQ,
about,
Hall of Fame,
and so on. These pages are plain old text.
There is no smarts in them to decide if you get
an ad or not. This is for performance reasons.
It just doesn't make sense to run scripts on
those pages. So you'll see banner ads on them,
but they won't affect your subscription.

The Main Pages

The homepage, articles, and
comments. These pages are configured in your
subscription settings. You can choose which
page types to see ads on. By default, a
subscriber has ads suppressed on the index and
article pages, but comments are left with ads
on. This is because it's really easy to
casually load dozens of comments pages.

The lesser pages:

There are a variety of other pages on Slashdot
that are dynamic, but are less loaded than The
Main Pages. For example:
Users
(for example editing your preferences),
Submissions
(submitting a story),
Journals
(I think you can figure that out yourself), and
Subscriptions
(Well, Duh!). If you are a subscriber, and are
set to suppress ads on one of the Main Pages,
then we suppress ads on these pages without
decrementing your page bank. In other words,
buy the ads on the homepage or articles, and
you get Journals, Submissions, Users,
and so forth for free.

To suppress all ads, set your limit to 0
(non-intuitive, we know—think of it as selecting
"false") and remember to make sure that you have "No
Ads" selected for all three options.

Are there other advantages to being a subscriber?

There are a few "plums" for subscribers, yes. Please be
warned that this list is subject to change as
necessary:

You can see each story 10-20 minutes before it
goes "live." (Assuming we posted it that far in
advance, which usually we do.) Look for the red
titlebar and a timestamp from "The Mysterious
Future." More information is available in
this story.

You can get a message sent to you when people
change their relationship to you (friend or
foe). Go to your
message prefs
page and edit the "Relationship Change"
setting. Don't worry, you'll get at most one
message per day, summarizing that day's
changes.

When
writing a journal entry,
your choices for comments are not just
"Comments Disabled" and "Comments Enabled." You
can also limit commenting to just your friends;
just your friends and their friends; to exclude
just your foes; or to exclude your foes and
your friends' foes.

You get a "More Comments" link on
your user page
and on
other users' pages.
Going through comment history might be a bit
DB-intensive but we trust subscribers not to
abuse the privilege. (But just to be clear —
robots will be banned, regardless of whether
they subscribe or not!)

You can add up to 400
friends
and
foes,
instead of being limited to 200.

You get an asterisk appended to your user ID
for all comments you post while you're a
subscriber. Other users can adjust those
comments' scores up, if they want... or down,
if they're prejudiced against subscribers for
some reason. If you're bashful, you can switch
this off (check the "No Subscriber Bonus"
checkbox while posting).

Your personal index
feed,
linked from the bottom of the homepage, will be
customized for your
homepage preferences.
If you have sections set up to always appear on
your homepage, they will be in your custom RSS
feed too—and the same holds for sections
or authors you have excluded.

Note that several of these "plums" require that you
pick "No Ads" on at least one type of page, and that
your limit of the maximum number of ads suppressed per
day not be decreased (below the default value of 10).
If you don't seem to be able to take advantage of the
features listed above, go to your
Edit Subscription
page, and doublecheck your settings.